Lounge of the Lab Lemming

I'm a geochemist. In the past ten years I've fixed mass spectrometers, blasted sapphires with a laser beam, explored for uranium in a nature reserve, and measured growth patterns in fish ears, and helped design the next generation of the world's most advanced ion probe. My main interest is in-situ mass spectrometry, but I have a soft spot in my heart for thermodynamics, drillers, and cosmochemistry.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

This is a brief update to last week’s post on nominating for
society prizes.There has been somediscussion on twitter about biased language in letters of recommendation, particularly for junior women. This
was an issue I was vaguely aware of, but didn’t especially delve into deeply at the time.
Our
basic approach was to mostly focus on the science, which of course doesn’t have
a gender, and explain why the science she did was so exciting. You can see my
citation in the previous post. I’m not posting anyone else’s letter on this
blog, but I will put the combined word cloud here, along with a list of high
frequency words:

-When nominated, women are about as likely
as men to win society awards.

-However, nominations skew more male than
the general population of scientists

-Nominators are mostly crusty old farts,
and young scientists (young meaning anyone under 50) are not stepping up and
nominating people.

I forgot all about this pressing issue
until June (still 2014), when the MGPV division of the Geological Society of
America announced that they would be awarding a new early career scientist
prize. At that point, I suddenly recalled the issue, and thought, “Might this be a testable hypothesis? What happens when some random industrial scientist
barely 40 years old tries nominating?”

I’d sat through a few award ceremonies
before, and seen these sorts of things handed out to a wide variety of
scientists, from really cool people I’d never heard of to the banal big names
who had spent a quarter of a century cruising on achievements from when I was
in high school. But in most cases, the nominees were very senior, old,
respected scientists. And they nominated other, slightly less old but otherwise
very similar scientists. I suppose their point of view is that if they’re
great, other great people ought to be pretty similar.

I am not a great scientist. I’m a
disorganized industry hack whose H-index can be tallied on the fingers of Count
Rugen’s hand. So the way I see it, anyone I nominate for a prize should be as
unlike me as possible. So from there it was an easy step to revisit the
nomination gap studies, and think, “Might there be, perhaps, any women who
would be appropriate for this award?” Luckily, our nominee came to mind almost
immediately.

As someone who went through college
loathing political correctness, my first thought was therefore, “OK, now am I
cutting any more deserving nominees out here by nominating her?” As it turns
out, when I was still working at the ANU (see the first three years of this
blog) we had many really good grad students. However, none of them really took
ownership of their favorite field of science and made it their own the way our
nominee did, so I was satisfied that I had made a good choice.

The GSA Junk Mail that announced the
creation of a new award came out in June 20 of 2014, I probably read it and
connected it back to the earlier exhortations to nominate about a week or two
later, around the end of the month. The trouble was, the deadline for
nominations was the 15th of July. And I didn’t start approaching people for
supporting letters until the second.

My strategy was simple: Here in Canberra, cruise the ANU
hallways to figure out who was actually in town and able to put something
together on zero notice. I threw the Japanese postdoc into the too-hard basket,
as I didn’t personally know any of the people she worked with there, and also
language barrier, and concentrated on her colleagues at DTM. I also approached
some big names in the field with whom she hadn’t collaborated, to see if they
thought it was a sensible nomination and would be willing to write something
supportive from more of a peer review perspective.

I was pleasantly surprised at how
enthusiastic most of the people I approached were. I guess the good thing about
picking a good candidate, however, is that people really do get excited and are
willing to get on board and turn letters around in remarkably quick timescales.
I had my three supporters lines up by the seventh, and three letters in hand
within hours of the deadline. In responsible, organized nominator fashion, I
had my nomination letter done a whallopping three days before the deadline, and
circulated it to the rest of the team for a science check and general feedback
(as I had never done this before).

Around the time of the deadline, a
potential referee who had been out of contact emailed me saying that he really
wanted to write a fourth letter, and could the deadline be extended? So I asked
the coordinator, and he said that as long as a complete submission package was
in on time, we could have a week or two to get additional bonus letters in. One
such letter was submitted.

And that is how Dr. Frances Elaine Jenner won
the Geological Society of America’s inaugural MGPV early career award. The only
sad part of the story was that I was not able to go to the GSA meeting where
the award was presented, so one of the guys who wrote a letter of support gave
the citation. He’s a proper academic scientist anyway, so probably had the
gravitas that I lack. The citation and acceptance are on page 8-10 of thisnewsletter.

The point of all this story is this: It is
possible for mid career non-academic scientists to throw together a nomination
at the last minute, and get support from respected scientists, and construct a
nomination package sufficient to win the prize. Don’t die wondering, folks.

Now, I should point out that I did have a
few things tilted in my favor:

Firstly I attended a number of top
institutions during my academic career, which put me in contact with top
scientists like Dr. Jenner. Having a great candidate goes a long way towards
making a case.

Secondly,
I’ve been kicking around science in one capacity or another to know her
referees, several of whom were quite respected scientists. I was reasonably
acquainted with three of the four supporters I got letters from, and had at
least been to the fourth guy’s lab.

Thirdly, once the decision was made to go, I went all out. This isn't the sort of thing to be half-assed. I read all her papers, and tried to put together a passionate yet logical case for why they made our nominee a prizeworthy scientist.

I’m sure the greybeards who get together at
annual meetings to sip nasty scotch plan out their conventional safe picks way
in advance, but with a little passion, some broad thinking, and a genuine
enthusiasm for science, anyone can nominate for their respective society’s
awards, and win. And there’s a month and a half to go before the deadline forthe 2019 award, so don’t be shy, y’all.

And in case anyone wants the really nitty
gritty details, here’s the nomination I wrote in a sleep deprived haze during the first week of July 2014. Typos and all:

Nomination for Frances Jenner

Dear Division Secretary,

I would like to nominate Frances Elaine
Jenner for the GSA’s MGPV division early career award for 2015.Dr. Jenner is an outstanding young analytical
geochemist who has pioneered several novel analytical techniques and applied
them to igneous rocks from a wide temporal and geographical range.Her ability to generate novel, high quality
data has allowed her and her colleagues to overturn previous assumptions or
hypotheses about a variety of igneous processes, giving us a better
understanding of mafic volcanism over the last 3.8 billion years of Earth
history.

Upon the completion of her PhD on the
nature of Eoarchean rocks (Jenner et al., 2009; Jenner et al., 2013), Dr. Jenner immediately branched out into a new field of study,
namely the quantification of “less commonly analyzed elements” in volcanic
glasses. One such element is selenium.In theory, selenium should be a useful proxy for sulfur in systems (such
as volcanic glasses) which may have undergone partial degassing, but in
practice, there was no standard analytical protocol for measuring this low
abundance chalcogenide in silicate materials.Using the electron microprobe, laser ablation inductively coupled mass
spectrometry (LA-ICPMS), and the Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe
(SHRIMP), Dr. Jenner characterized a suite of commonly used reference materials
(Jenner et al., 2009). This
study remains the only case where the SHRIMP has been used as a negative ion
trace element quantification tool.However, despite developing this novel SIMS technique, she and her colleagues
used the SIMS data to devise an analytical protocol to routinely measure selenium
using LA-ICPMS. The use of the cheaper, more versatile LA-ICPMS equipment meant
that selenium contents of target glasses and minerals could be determined along
with other elements of interest in a wholescale manner much more economically
than the use of the SHRIMP would allow.

While an analytical specialist may have
been content to run this application without too much thought to the geologic implications,
Dr. Jenner and her colleagues immediately put it to use in investigating the
enrichment of Cu, Ag, and Au in arc-related magmas.Their “magnetite crisis” paper (Jenner et al., 2010) uses
this selenium analytical technique to generate compelling data relating to the
trends of these elements with magma evolution. This dispels the earlier, intellectually
unsatisfying notion of a fugitive fluid or vapor phase, clearly showing that
magnetite crystallization triggers sulfide saturation by changing the magmatic
fO2.

The use of more, higher quality data to
reject a long held but data-poor assumption is a hallmark of Dr. Jenner’s
research.Although she has continued to
analyze selenium for the purpose of constraining sulfide saturation and
chalcogenide behavior (Jenner et al., 2012; Patten et al., 2013), her next major achievement was to roll out the same approach to
the rest of the periodic table, and a wider variety of sea floor volcanic glasses.

Jenner and O’Neill (2012b) is a primer
for how to analyze most of the periodic table in mafic glasses, with
corrections for interfered elements and methods for how to minimize analytical
difficulties.While the analysis of
volcanic glasses by LA-ICPMS is not new, this study is remarkable in its
thorough examination of issues of normalization and reproducibility which have
not necessarily been presented in a single unified study before.

Jenner and O’Neill (2012a) then
apply these techniques to hundreds of ocean floor volcanic glasses, yielding a
rich, high quality dataset that allows them to realize (O’Neill and Jenner, 2012) that the mid-ocean ridge fractional crystallization model that we
were all taught as undergraduates decades ago cannot explain their new, higher
quality data, and needs refinement.

Once again, Dr. Jenner and her colleagues
develop new tools illuminate a previously underconstrained system, yielding a
novel explanation with greater predictive power. This changes the way we think
about the main type of magma generation on Earth.

There are quite a few talented young
geoscientists who develop new analytical techniques.And many of them apply them to known areas of
scientific debate, to build up or tear down evidence for one or more prevailing
hypotheses.But Dr. Jenner is unusual in
having both the analytical skills to devise new approaches and the intellectual
agility to find entirely new geological interpretations, which were not even
part of the debate before her studies were carried out.

And although Dr. Jenner is very much an
analytical geochemist, it is her ability to find the natural rocks to use her
procedures on which underpins her success.While she collaborates extensively with experimental petrologists, she
mostly analyses natural samples of diverse provenance.Working from the Greenland Eoarchean to
modern submarine volcanics, her areas of study span more than 95% of the
terrestrial rock record in geologic time.Her onshore field areas range from the periglacial west coast of Greenland
to tropical Samoa. While ocean drilling programs do not fit the
stereotypical mold of outcrop hammering and rock licking, they are
none-the-less the only way we currently have of accessing the ~70% of our
planet’s surface that is under water. And it is her ability to choose the right
sample or samples for her new analytical methods which allows her to discover
novel petrologic processes.

Finally, it is worth noting that in a
competitive field like academic geology, there is an element of luck which is
often a contributor to success.Whether
it is happening on just the right rock, or simply having jobs appear in a manner
that allows a stable, productive workflow, simple good fortune can often be the
difference between a discovery and a confirmation. Dr. Jenner has had, by far,
the worst luck of anyone I know with an advanced geology degree.

I have worked in industry and government
for the past seven years, so I know many of the situations which result in a
person leaking out of the academic pipeline.Dr. Jenner has experienced a large number of these “career-terminal”
events.But unlike the rest of us, she
has forced her way back into the pipeline with a combination of intellectual
firepower, gritty determination, and the most dedicated work eithic of anyone I
have met in any field. This has allowed her to not just stay employed, but
maintain control of her career trajectory, despite her three postdocs and her
faculty job being on four different continents.And despite her hardships, she is one of the most enthusiastic, positive,
energetic scientists I know.This, as
much as her academic record, makes her a role model for all young scientists. Frances
Jenner would be an inspirational choice for the GSA committee as the inaugural
MGPV division Early Career scientist.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

It has been a bad month for flashbacks for victims of sexual
harassment in Academia. First came the horrific stories of campus harassment
from Rochester University,
followed by the Antarctic harassment from Boston
University, followed by the story of Harassment
by a major Hollywood movie producer. At this
point the producer has lost his job, and investigations continue for the two
professors. And closer to home, the University of Canberra professor who was
convicted of raping a student has appealed against his 4 year sentence.

As geologists, we need to figure out how to consign these
dirtbags to the fossil record, preferably on a human, not geologic timescale.
There are many ways to wipe out a species, but I am going to focus on what I
think is an important one that is often overlooked: Habitat destruction.

It is no accident that harassment issues are constantly
popping up in the academic and creative workplaces. Both sectors value their
reputation, and are willing to defend the appearance of everything being fine.
Both disciplines are popular career choices, with many more people willing to
work in them than there are available jobs. Both sectors value intelligence to
the point of considering it a virtue, or being willing to overlook other
problems in the name of “Genius.” Both sectors have substantial hierarchies,
with few formal checks and balances on power.

It is these problems that we should address if we want these
perpetrators to go extinct. The names aren’t important- I haven’t even
mentioned them above. As long as universities and studios build the perfect
ecological niche for abusers to thrive in, then they will flock to the sectors.
It is institutional change that is needed to actually stop the abuse.

So, specifically, what has to happen?

Firstly, reporting mechanisms need to be transparent and incorruptible.
The reason that these scum can continue to wreck peoples lives for decades is
that complaints, even if made, are too easy to bury. An administration that
prefers ongoing, covert sexual assault on its campus over an embarrassing
headline can simply use the reporting mechanism as a way of silencing victims,
allowing the rapist to continue offending for decades.

Whomever victims report to, be it the police, the funding
agencies, professional organizations, or some special independent body, the
report receiver needs to be able to investigate allegations without being
pressured from the university. In cases where potentially illegal activities
have occurred and complainants are threatened, then university officials should
be subject to the same treatment as organized criminals who try to intimidate
witnesses.

Sexual predators are ambush predators- they need cover from
which to attack, and removing administrative cover gives them fewer places to
hide. There must be heavy penalties for authorities who fail to act, especially
if the offender commits further offences. Administrators who cover for
offenders so that they can offend again should be considered accessories.

However, these crooks are also pack animals, so a healthy
culture is important towards setting an example of what is and isn’t
professional behavior. This is not in itself a solution, but it makes sketchy behavior
stand out more easily, and it puts the ratbags on notice that the work place is
for real men, not whiney losers.

Finally, although habitat destruction is important, the
offenders to have to be hunted down when spotted. This is best done by the
whole work team, as uncharismatic megafauna can be dangerous in single combat.
However, a habitat in which they are allowed to operate with impunity is not detrimental
to them. It is by shrinking their range through a unfavorable setting that
allows them to be vulnerable to catastrophic events, but those events still
need to be initiated. If a change in corporate climate has weakened the
terrible lizardmen, and drying their environment removes their cover and their
hiding places, then it is much easier to be the comet that wipes them out.

Saturday, October 07, 2017

I have never been a good fund raiser or salesman.My disjointed talents do not stretch to the
power of persuasion.

Nor have I ever understood the concept of fundraising linked
to an outdoor recreational activity. A few years after I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I heard of people doing it as a way to
raise funds for one cause another. But why this particular recreational
activity is one to be used for a cause baffles me. If you like riding a bike,
ride a bike. If you like drinking beer, drink beer. Doing either to excess,
like riding a hundred miles for cancer, or drinking a sixpack for dementia,
never really made any sense to me.

However, this winter I signed up for the Sydney-Gong bicycle ride, and one of the conditions of
entry is to raise funds for multiple sclerosis. At first, this gave me pause.
But as I considered, I reckoned, why not? If you are going to have a limit for
a popular activity, why not accept, as a condition of entry, a certain amount
of community assistance. And multiple sclerosis is certainly a worthy casue.

MS is an autoimmune disease. Like arthritis, or lupus, it
can strike otherwise healthy people in the prime of life, and it can be
debilitating, even fatal, if not treated. Like these other autoimmune diseases,
treatment has improved as a result of science, but there is still a ways to go
before a cure, or even a more effective system of management, can be achieved.

I do not personally know anyone in meatspace with MS;
although I believe that one of our fellow geobloggers may suffer from the
disease. However, I am not convinced that personal attachment should be a
prerequisite for decreasing human suffering through scientific research. After
all, as long time readers of this Lounge undoubtedly know, I am not a
particularly empathetic person. And, as the social aspect of the internet has
evolved over the past dozen or so years, I have noticed an overabundance of
heartstring-tugging emotive appeals. I will not add to their din. Instead, I
offer an alternative way to contribute to the betterment of society without the
awkward warm and fuzzies.

And if, like me, you are a bit too wry to donate to an event
linked to a wholesome activity like bike riding, then I have an alternative. I
will crassly debase myself by putting the charity sixpack back on the
proverbial table. If I can get a hundred bucks donated through the MS ride page
with comments attesting that your donation is earmarked for the beer, not the
ride, then I will drink six bottles at the conclusion of the ride. Because I’m
the sort of guy who is willing to drink beer…. FOR SCIENCE!

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Congratulations
to everybody who is lucky enough to live in the eclipse path, or who made the
effort to get under the shadow of the moon! I hope it was grand; I was on the
wrong side of the planet this time, so I have had to enjoy it via the internet.

Of
course, the Internet likes to have fun, so along with the various actual
eclipse photos (which range from cool to spectacular), there have been some
pictures replacing the black disk of the moon with the DeathStar.Long time
readers of this blog will know that this Lounge has a great view of imaginary spacecraft in orbit; the Death Star fits into
that category nicely. So with a bit of basic math and physics, we can calculate
the conditions under which the Death Star can eclipse the sun, as viewed from
here on Earth.

But
first, we need to define our Death Star. I won’t dig too far down into the
seedy underbelly of Srat Wars fandom, but a oft repeated figure for the size of
the Death Star is a diameter of 100 miles, which yields an 80km radius. As for
the density (which we’ll need later for reasons I don’t want to spoil), we will
go with 800kg/m3. This is the density of something that is 10% steel and 90%
air, which would give it the same general construction as modern naval vessels.
This makes the Death Star slightly more dence than pure ethanol, but
substantially lighter than the beer which fuels this blog.

In
order to eclipse the sun, the Death Star needs to subtend a larger angle of sky
than the Sun. For the sake of simplicity, we will call the sun angle 0.5
degrees, or 30 minutes of arc (it actually varies slightly, as the Earth’s
orbit is elliptical, and the eccentricity of this orbit changes between 0 and 6
percent depending on where in the Milanković cycle we are). So, given a 80 km
radius, the Death Star can eclipse the sun if it is closer than
80/sin(0.25deg)= ~18,300 km.

This
is much farther than near Earth orbit, but much closer than geosynchronous
orbit (about 36,000 km altitude). It is also, of course, about 21 times closer
than the Moon, which is about 21 times larger than the Death Star.However, it means that if the Death Star was
in Geosynchronous orbit (to ‘hover’ over a target, for example), it would not
eclipse the sun; it would block out at most a quarter of the light, which would
be barely noticeable by people down below.

On
the other had, if the Death Star was in low Earth orbit, like the International
Space Station, it could easily eclipse the Sun. An 80km radius space station
only 360 km up would be huge from the point of view of an observer directly
underneath, blotting out more than 25 degrees of arc in the sky as it zoomed
past at 8 km/sec (or one diameter every 20 seconds). However, it isn’t clear if
the Death Star could fly this close to our planet.

The
orbital velocity of a satellite around the Earth, in meters per second, is
sqrt(GM/R), where G is the Gravitational Constant (6.67E-11 m3kg-1s-2), M is
the mass of the Earth (6E24 kg), and R is the radius of the orbit IN METERS
(not km). So with an orbital radius of 6700 km (329km above the mean surface),
the orbital velocity is 7728 m/s. The problem for the Empire is that the Death
Star has a radius of 80km, so the guys sitting in the gun turrets facing the
Earth only have an orbital radius of 6620 km. Thus they will be orbiting at 7775 km/s,
47 m/s faster than the space station. For people who live in the real world,
that’s a 105 miles per hour, or 165 km/hour difference. Smashing your troops
against the walls at a hundered miles per hour is going to impede their ability
to fire their super laser, and it is possible that even the structural
integrity of the Death Star would be under threat this close to the Earth.

Back
here in Science Land, we call the closest that a satellite can get to a planet
without being torn apart by this sort of differential orbital speed the Roche
Limit. The Roche Limit determines the closest approach a satellite can orbit a
planet without being torn apart. Technically, the Roche limit only applies to
objects held together by gravity- e.g. with no tensile strength. Steel, the
purported structural material of the Death Star, has substantial tensile
strength- this is why it’s used for everything from bicycle spokes to
suspension bridge cables. But even if the space station is held together by the
tensile strength of the steel, that will be little comfort to everything and
everyone that isn’t tied down; even if the Death Star could survive inside the
Roche limit, the occupants wouldn’t. So in order to know if a fully operational
Death Star can eclipse the sun, we need to calculate the Roche Limit, and
determine whether it is closer or farther than the maximum eclipse distance of
~18,300 km calculated at the top of this blog post.

The
Roche limit equation is d = R (2 rhoM/rhom)^1/3, where

R
is the radius of the Primary, rhoM is the density of the primary,
and rhom is the density of the moon. And the assumption we are using
is that the density of the death star is 0.8 g/cc or 800 kg/m3 (a
bit less than my second beer).

As
for the other numbers, the Earth’s radius is 6371km, and the earth’s density is 5500kg/m3. So the Roche limit for the Death Star is 15,263 km.

This
is closer than the maximum eclipse distance of 18,300 km (which is a distance,
not a radius, so you can add up to 6371 more km for an equatorial eclipse
viewer), so there is a range, albeit a fairly well restricted range, in the
orbital radius of roughly 16,000 to 24,000 km where the Death Star is far
enough from Earth to not be tidally disrupted, but still close enough to blot
out the sun. But it wouldn’t be blotted out for very long. A 16000 radius orbit
has an orbital velocity of 5 km/s. So even with an equatorial observer only
10,000 km away, where the shadow is largest, at 72 km wide, totality would last
less than 15 seconds. This is almost the exact elapsed time from Tarkin’s “Fire
when ready” to weapon discharge. And Bonnie Tyler
wouldn’t even have time to get a little bit tired of listening to the sound of
her tears.

Monday, May 22, 2017

With rapid melting in the Arctic, and potential glacial
instability in Antarctica. the planet’s
present cryosphere is in a spot of bother. The root cause of this is warming
from the heat trapped by greenhouse gasses, mostly CO2. But while many
suggestions have been made for reducing CO2 output, as yet there are relatively
few mothods for capturing those emissions which are still occurring. And with
international agreements lacking enforcement mechanisms, a new push for Coal in
the US,
and decades of record rates of emissions growths, humanity clearly needs
someone to police the worlds emissions. And we don’t need any old police. We
need fashion police.

Although many proposals have been made for finding ways to
prevent our hunger for fossil fuels from ruining the atmosphere, not nearly
enough of these strategies have included the use of tacky clothing. And yet,
the potential for horrific fashion statements to save the world should not be
underestimated. The reason for this is that ultimately, the easiest way to
scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to react it with an alkali or
alkali earth oxide, thereby forming a carbonatemineral. While silicate weathering will do this naturally over a
50-100kA timescale, we can’t really afford to wait that long. Roasting
carbonates obviously won’t accomplish anything, since that simply makes the
alkali oxides available by releasing CO2. However, there are alternatives.

One way to generate an effective carbon dioxide scrubber is
to split salt (from ocean water) into its component sodium and chlorine. The
sodium will rapidly (on a geologic timescale) oxidize, hydrate, and carbonate,
forming NaHCO3. This should be reasonably effective, so long as we can
sequester the chlorine that is produced as a byproduct. And here is where the
tacky clothes come in. During the latter part of the 20th century, outrageous
costumes were constructed out of the polymer polyvinyl chloride. If we can
simply manufacture enough disco pats, fake leather jackets, and not-so-Sunday
dresses, that will sequester the chlorine from salt electrolysis in the world’s
wardrobes, so that the sodium can be used for atmospheric CO2 drawdown.

Doing a bit of math here, with annual emissions of about 29
billion tons of CO2, we will need about 15 billion tons of Na to scrub our
emissions. This requires approximately 55 billion tons of PVC to store the
chlorine left over from the salt decomposition (powering the electrolysis is
left as an exercise for the reader). Luckily, due to the large world
population, this works out to only about 8 tons of PVC per person per year, or
about 21 kg of PVC per day.

None of the PVC outfits I can find for sale on the internet
at this hour appear to contain 21 kg of material. They are generally a little
bit flimsier than that. And even with a new steampunk, burlesque, gothic, and
disco outfit every day for every man, woman, and child on Earth, we are still
looking to be short by a factor of 50. Buying 21 kg of new PVC outfits a day
would necessitate a costume change every 7 minutes. Luckily, there are other
things which PVC can be made into.

For example, the credit cards used to purchase PVC outfits
by people too brazen to stoop to cash are made of PVC. And while they only
weigh a few grams each, most people do have a few. Similarly, the music to which
PVC clad people traditionally dance comes from an archaic form of grooved PVC
platter known as a “record”. Buying 140 LP records a day will put all of the
world’s citizens at their PVC quota without having to wear anything at all.

So fear not, reader. There is hope. with enough old time
music and garish clothing, anything is possible.

Disclaimer:

All opinions, measurements, figures, and facts on this page are the personal opinions of Charles W. Magee, Jr, and do not represent the views of any of his employers: past, present, present-but-about-to-be-past, or future. None of the content herein has been subject to peer review, and should be treated with caution or derision. Any passing mention of OSHA code violations, criminal activities, unethical or unscientific behavior, or the clandestine Australian nuclear weapons program are fictions created to make rhetorical points, and do not represent the reality of my, or anyone else's, workplace. Do not attempt any scientific protocols described herein at home, with the exception of the chocolate chip cookie recipe. Do not apply the products of that protocol to individuals with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or cholesterol, egg, wheat, dairy, or chocolate allergies. Do not view this blog continuously for more than 45 minutes without stretching and taking other precautions to prevent computer-related chronic injury.
email labhampster@gmail.com, but replace hampster with the arctic rodent after which this blog is named.